I was just 30 minutes into a russian defence battle, and i was watching a german guy run across an open area, where my riflemen opened fire. as soon as the blood was pumped out of him and he fell dead, Firefight encountered a problem and needed to close. The game froze for a second before it shut down.

Garnier1 wrote:I was just 30 minutes into a russian defence battle, and i was watching a german guy run across an open area, where my riflemen opened fire. as soon as the blood was pumped out of him and he fell dead, Firefight encountered a problem and needed to close. The game froze for a second before it shut down.

I think I've got this fixed in version 3.99d which I've uploaded. I think what was happening is that when you played as other nationalities sometimes the surnames were too long (especially the Russian ones) for the buffer I had allowed for printing in the radio message. So when that person was wounded or killed the game would crash!

I took 8 wounded, but mostly towards the end when it got a bit messy. Learnt not to under-estimate the AI. Often I'll get too used to how a game works and not bother to do something I would against a human, or do it half-heartedly, not believing the AI would do what I'm pre-emptively countering. In this battle I rolled up the left flank, ignoring the difficult to take houses and open terrain on the right. It went exceedingly well, massed rifle firepower pinning the enemy and then tanks moving on ahead causing a rout which was promptly gunned down. I drove them back, wood by wood using this method.

They opened fire with anti-tank weapons from their infantry squads, but they never hit. Frankly, I think the AI needs some way of being ordered (and understanding on the AI side) to lay low, so that when you're facing a tank you can wait until the last second to nail it (from a favourable side too). Tanks have crappy vision (though I'm not sure it's any worse than the infantrys, though it should be) and rely on support to make sure they don't get ambushed, not much of a worry in this game at the moment.

Anyway, as I pushed back I was left with a front slightly too narrow for my units. I decided to place a rifle squad to cover the right-flank... thank God I did! The Germans decided to bring the squads that had been in the houses in towards the centre. Luckily my flanking squad saw them and we caught them in the open fields. I took some casulties though as I was caught between fire from the objective and fire from some guys who made it to the haystacks. If I'd remembered to move up my HMG team earlier I'd have been okay, they've had been able to pin either the fields or objective, but no, I forgot and they got caught in an artillery barrage on the way and arrive late.

Luckily, a hard infantry push on the left made the gunner crew abandon the 50mm (it was wonderful to watch ) and so I was free to move my tanks to the flank in good positions to fire. It was secure and I won the objective in 22 minutes with 1 death and 8 wounded

Quitch wrote:I thought 3.99x was only out as a demo, not a full version release yet? How are people playing defences with other nationalities?

I've been letting people who've helped out with graphics etc... have the full version so that they can test more things out. If you're a regular contributor to this message board (and you've bought a full copy already!) I'd be happy for you to get hold of a full version as I think I'm just about done now. Send me an email - preferably with your receipt from order RegNow.com if you've been posting a few ideas up here. I'll probably delete this post in a few days so I don't end up spending all day with updates...

* A mortar shell of mine landed among the haystacks and left a smoking target. Now, I checked trhe casulties at the end and there was a single gun on the enemy side and no tanks, and I know where the gun is... why was there smoke coming from the haystack area?

* Oh, and a slight interface niggle. Troop ammo is indicated by colour filled bullets losing their colour, but in the same panel the loss of grenades is indicated by the loss of an icon. A confusing system.

* The rank system also needs a bit of work. Enemy losses compared to your own don't seem to be taken into account. I ordered everyone to take the objective (i.e. move to it) and won in twelve minutes.

I lost 32 men, had 7 wounded, lost two tanks and kept 35 men taking 6 prisoners.

Quitch wrote:
* A mortar shell of mine landed among the haystacks and left a smoking target. Now, I checked trhe casulties at the end and there was a single gun on the enemy side and no tanks, and I know where the gun is... why was there smoke coming from the haystack area?

It's the haystack burning!

Quitch wrote:* Oh, and a slight interface niggle. Troop ammo is indicated by colour filled bullets losing their colour, but in the same panel the loss of grenades is indicated by the loss of an icon. A confusing system.

Fair point! Those graphics are just ones I knocked up in 10 seconds while I was writing the code and I never got round to doing something better. Hopefully someone will email me something nicer...

Quitch wrote:* The rank system also needs a bit of work. Enemy losses compared to your own don't seem to be taken into account. I ordered everyone to take the objective (i.e. move to it) and won in twelve minutes.

OK, I'll take a look.

Quitch wrote:* You can't check troops status after the mission, and it's at the end of the mission you'd be most interested to know who killed what!

Good point.

Quitch wrote:* You run into a German 50mm gun during the demo, but according to the manual that gun wasn't in service during the year 1944 when the mission is based.

Thanks, I've edited the .txt file for the 50mm so it won't appear in the future that late on. Good thing too as it struggles to knock out one of your Shermans.

Andy Brown wrote:
One thing I've noticed is that, after a one-off game, I can look around the battlefield and examine my troop roster but that I can't do this after campaign games. This is important, IMO, and it would be useful and rewarding to be able to examine the enemy's roster after a battle as well.

Got that fixed! You can pan around now from version 3.99f onwards after a campaign battle.

Sean O'Connor wrote:
Fair point! Those graphics are just ones I knocked up in 10 seconds while I was writing the code and I never got round to doing something better. Hopefully someone will email me something nicer...

I emailed you something nicer just now. It took me five times as long as it did you!